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Hi, my name is Dave Morris and this is my first podcast for HPR. I want to talk to you

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on the subject of VIM plugins. I started using VI, Fair Time Ago when I was given the

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job of administering a bunch of multi-use, a unique systems. I found that VI was available

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on most of these systems. If it wasn't, then the alternative was a thing called

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edge, which was appalling. Anyway, whatever happened, EMAX was quite hard to combine.

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Certainly wasn't available on the machines out of the box. I'm not quite sure when I moved

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from VI to VIM and GIVIM. I might even be as long as 15 years ago. But since then, it's

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been my editor of choice and I've tended to use GIVIM and have it configured up as an IDE.

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It's not quite as smooth as a purpose-built IDE, but it's not bad as long as you know.

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It's a strangeness. Now for this talk, I'm assuming you know the basics of VIM. If you

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don't know how to install plugins, then I've pointed you to a very useful article in the

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show notes. The show notes all look so tell you where to get each of the plugins. And

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you'll notice that some of them have not been updated for a while. But my choice is

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the plugins tend to have quite high ratings. So hopefully they'll be useful to you. There are

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a few images in the notes, all of which are set up using GIVIM, for example. You need to have

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a good read of the help test text for each plugin if you decide to use them. So the

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first one I want to talk about is called Nerd Tree. I'm not quite sure where they came up with

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that name, but certainly a tree and it's used by this nerd. Anyway, it's a file browser which

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when you invoke it tends to sit on the left hand side of your window. I don't know if

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I'm assuming you know a bit about VIM Windows. Whatever it splits the main window and drops

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itself on the left hand side. You invoke it with a colon command. The colon commands open up the

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command line at the bottom of the window. You would type Nerd Tree and it's quite important to get

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the capitalization right. It's capital NERDT. Lowercase RW. Then you follow that with the directory

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name. I prefer to use Nerd Tree with GIVIM because it tends to be a generally more usable. You can

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use the mouse to click on things and scroll it and so on and so forth. Which I just generally

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find more usable. There are lots of key mappings within Nerd Tree, far too many to talk about here,

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but just give you a flavor. If you put your cursor on a directory in the Nerd Tree itself,

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then pressing T will open a new tab with that tree in it so you can be editing multiple files

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out of the same directory in different tabs. If you're not up to speed with VIM tabs, then I'll leave

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you to do a bit of investigation on that. It's a very, very powerful feature. I definitely recommend

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to use it. The other one I use quite a lot is putting the cursor on a directory pressing

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lowercase R, will of course the directory to be refreshed. Nerd Tree also offers bookmarks which you

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can create through various commands or key sequences which I won't go into. There are lots and

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lots of configuration options that you can put in the dot VIM or C file and I've given you some

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examples in the show notes where I make sure that Nerd Tree is only invoked when I'm in GVIM mode

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and not in standard VIM mode. I'll mention probably mention for every plugin actually the

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though the way that you get help, but mostly it's pretty much the same. You would type call on

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H or help if you wish H is the abbreviation followed by the name of the plugin and I didn't know

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myself actually but just discovered that pretty much all of these plugins don't care about the

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case of the the name that you type after the H and that's largely because the authors have made

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sure that the relevant tags are in the in the help files that will get you to where you want to be

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regardless of what case you you give. The other note though I thought you might be interested in is

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if you put your cursor in the Nerd Tree window and press the question mark then you get a quick help

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which is a quick abbreviation list of abbreviations for how to use the plugin. Okay so the next one

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it's called bash support. It this offers a lot of facilities that you'd expect to find in an

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IDE and as you can guess it's specifically designed for working with bash scripts. It adds a menu to

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GVIM called bash not surprisingly. Now you can look at the show notes to get an image of

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what it what it looks like with the menu open. I use it particularly to start each group with a

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standard header so that all of my scripts look pretty much the same contain the same sort of

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comments and and that type of thing. You can also do things like maintain a library of code snippets

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so you can you can paste into your code so thereby saving you from hunting about all over the place for

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ways to do things that you might have forgotten. It can do stuff like check the syntax of a script run

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it debug it and as usual there's a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts. These in general

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begin with a backslash so a backslash CT lowercase inserts current date and time at the cursor

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which is great for putting time stamps in your in your comments or anything about sort

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of code and not too surprisingly help for this is invoked with call on h bash hyphen support

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or indeed bash without the hyphen support bash support just as one word so this particular

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writer has made sure that lots of tags in the file will get you to where you want to be in the

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help text. From the same stable as bash support is another plugin called Pearl support

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you're probably gathered that I'm a bash and Pearl scripter spend a fair bit of time writing these

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things. This one gives you equivalent facilities for editing Pearl scripts and it adds a Pearl

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menu to GVIM. I say that way because there are no menus in standard VIM. It's another bunch

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of GVIM of course and again I use it to form standard headers and I've got boiler plate which

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will create me a sort of standard empty script that I can then populate. Again you can manage code

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snippets with it and it will check syntax run on and debug a script. One of the functions I use

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quite a lot and it's called Pearl tidy. This is actually a standalone utility that you can use

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for the print when building a pulse script. It's abbreviation is backslase backslashri and what Pearl

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tidy does is to reformate your code and it does that according to its own built-in style but you

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can you can change that you can adjust it. So you can set up your own personal or house style. If

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you're part of a group doing collaborative programming it's it's amazingly important to have

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similar style otherwise you find it difficult to read somebody else's code. The way you can figure

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it is through a dot Pearl tidy RC file and there's loads of documentation about this. I personally

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prefer to use it through GVIM because it's a bit of a hassle to use standalone I find

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if to remember more. The other one I use the other part of the pulse pod that I use is Pearl critic.

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This is invoked with backslashriPC. This is a thing that does a compliance check with

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the best practices book written by Damian Conway is a big name in the Pearl community.

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There's an image in the show notes that shows a script being subjected to this. There's a certain

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sort of school-marmish feel to the way that it criticizes your code. It's times when you

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throw it out the window but on the whole it does some really useful things. You can turn

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up and down its level of criticism. Again it's more convenient to use through an editor than it

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is to use the standalone version. And finally you can invoke help for Pearl support by typing

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call on H Pearl support with or out without the hyphen. Next I want to mention plug-in called

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man-page view. Not too surprisingly this allows you to view man pages from within the editor.

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You invoke it by typing call on man with capital M, MAN space and then the topic. Or you can

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position your cursor on an editing window and press capital K and it will invoke the viewer.

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If it can if if the keyword has a man-page entry is relevant to man-page. So once you've got

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your man-page up you can search it and scroll it about cut and paste from it which is always

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very useful. There'll be good examples often in a man-page that you might want to try out.

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I certainly find this amazing in the useful saves hopping out of the editor and going to look at

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something on another window perhaps. It's help as usual is invoked with call on H man-page view.

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The next plug-in view is called surround. It allows you to add, delete or change so-called surroundings.

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By this I mean things like pairs of quotes, pairs of braces, parentheses and so forth. This one

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is driven entirely by key sequences. The examples that I've given you some examples in the show notes

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because it's it really needs something that you can look at to fully appreciate. But I'll just

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see whether I can speak about a couple of them. If your cursor is in an editing window inside a string

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enclosed in quotes then if you type ds both lowercase quote and then that's it yeah that's

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all your type. If you type that then it just deletes the quote ds quote deletes the quote.

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If you're inside a string in brackets square brackets then if you type cs square bracket

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closed that's closed square bracket closed parentheses then it will delete the square brackets

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and replace with parentheses. So you can see it's actually quite a powerful thing.

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Little hard to get your head round but personally I think well worth the trouble.

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Again as always you can get lots of help about how to use this with call on h surround.

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Next comes fugitive. This is an interface to the get version control system that you can use within

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the editor and I've put an example of what what the screen looks like if you type the command

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call on capital G status that's the equivalent of the command line get status that shows you the

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current state of repository. It gives access to pretty much all of the the get commands through

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one means or another either with direct commands or with commands to which you can add arguments.

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Again it's help is in book through call on h fugitive. Tag list is my next example.

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This is a plugin that lets you help. It gives you help with browsing source code.

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It creates a menu within gvm a menu is called tags and when you when you're editing a piece of source

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code then you'll find that the tags menu is populated with the functions classes and other major

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elements of your source code. You simply need to go to the menu and click on a tag to position

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the editor at that particular point. So if you're trying to find a the declaration of a

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subroutine whatever language you're dealing with then clicking on it will take you take you there.

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Under the hood it uses a package called exuberant c tags which is the most fantastic name

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and its job is to build a list of tags so it has syntactic knowledge of a whole bunch of

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languages which uses to build a tag file and this is then used by the tag list. There are other

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tag features within built into to them which I won't go into now but this I believe gives you

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a quite easy route to using this particular feature. There's an image in the show notes that

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gives you some idea of what you can do with it and now this there is not been telling you about

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how to get the help is that there are a few instances that don't conform to the normal

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normal way of doing it and in this this is one particular case. In this case you need to type

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call on hspace taglist.txt that's because the tag list is already a name within the standard

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them help file so that particular command invokes the things specific for this plugin.

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And my last plugin is called super tab. I think this is slightly controversial,

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partly because I'm not sure I like it. This provides word completion via the tab key.

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There's an example of it doing this in the show notes. So you type at least one character of the

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word that you're hoping to type you've forgotten how to spell it or something. You press tab

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and pop up menu comes up with the various options that this could be the various words that

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could match this. The thing that I'm not sure a like about this is that it hijacks the tab key

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and this means that if you want to enter a real tab for a new reason then you need to use control

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tab to do it which I'm not sure I want. I would like to be able to switch this on and off as I

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need it and I haven't yet found a way of doing it. There are other tab completion plugins available

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which I have not tested yet. I think I'm going to do that and see if there's something better

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than this. This seems to be the most popular one judging by the rating though. So that's my list of

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plugins. This is quite a quick review. There's a lot to be said about each one. Each could have a

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podcast to itself, I guess, if anybody would ever listen. The other thing to tell you is there's a

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whole world of plugins available on www.vim.org. Very very large and about you can browse through.

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So hope you found that useful.

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You have been listening to Hector Public Radio as Hector Public Radio does our

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we are a community podcast network that releases shows every week that you want to take the

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